THOMAS BROWNE’S QUINCUNX T-Shirt

This “quincunx” pattern, with accompanying Latin inscription, is taken from the title page of Thomas Browne‘s 17th century masterpiece The Garden of Cyrus and provides the central figure upon which he weaves his mystical vision of the interconnection of art, nature and the Universe. The pattern becomes also an important figure in W.G. Sebald’s 1999 novel Rings of Saturn. Sebald comments on how “Browne identifies this structure everywhere, in animate and inanimate matter: in certain crystaline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horsetail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies.”